US will spend up to $1 billion to combat bird flu, USDA secretary says

By Leah Douglas and Tom Polansek

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. will invest up to $1 billion to combat the spread of bird flu, as well as increase imports of eggs in an effort to drive down high prices, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said on Wednesday.

A three-year bird flu outbreak in U.S. poultry has killed 166 million chickens since 2022, according to USDA data.

The virus has also infected nearly 1,000 dairy herds and almost 70 people, including one who died, since early 2024.

The USDA will spend up to $500 million to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400 million to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu, Rollins said at a conference of state agriculture officials.

In a Wednesday Wall Street Journal column, Rollins said some of the money will come from cuts to USDA spending by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. But on a call with reporters later in the day, Rollins' chief of staff, Kailee Tkacz Buller, said the money was coming from the USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation, a discretionary pool of funding available to the secretary.

The agency did not immediately clarify the discrepancy.

The USDA is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorizing their use, Rollins said. The poultry industry is divided on whether to vaccinate chickens because of potential trade implications.

"It could be a solution, but to push that out now and require it, we're just not ready," Rollins said of vaccines when speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday.

Some industry groups expressed relief on a Wednesday call with Rollins that the agency did not move to require vaccines, said Rick Phillips, director of poultry professional services veterinarians for drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim, who was on the call.

"There was a little bit of a sigh that they didn't move fast on certain things like immediately going to vaccination until we better understand the nature of what we're dealing with," he said. The company received a U.S. license in 2023 for a bird flu vaccine for chickens.

The administration plans to increase imports and decrease exports of eggs to boost domestic supply and combat record high egg prices, Rollins said. Turkey has said it will export 15,000 tons of eggs to the U.S. through July.

This year, Turkey is expected to supply about 420 million eggs to the U.S., up from about 70 million normally, Buller said on the press call.

Egg prices have nearly doubled since last year. Scant supply is leading some consumers to "panic buy," said Virginia Tech economist Jadrian Wooten in an email.

In May, the administration of President Joe Biden allocated more than $800 million to combat bird flu in livestock. About $450 million of that money is still available, a USDA official said on Tuesday at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture conference.

(This story has been corrected to remove a reference to Boehringer Ingelheim receiving a vaccine license for turkeys in paragraph 10)

(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; additional reporting by Tom Polansek in Chicago; Editing by Louise Heavens, Christina Fincher and Bill Berkrot)